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Accepted Version Article [Review of:] The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition / gen. eds. Gary Taylor , John Jowett , Terri Bourus , and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2016 ; The New Oxford Shakespeare : The Complete Works : Critical Reference Edition / gen. eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 ; The New Oxford Shakespeare : Authorship Companion / eds. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 ERNE, Lukas Christian Reference ERNE, Lukas Christian. [Review of:] The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition / gen. eds. Gary Taylor , John Jowett , Terri Bourus , and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2016 ; The New Oxford Shakespeare : The Complete Works : Critical Reference Edition / gen. eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 ; The New Oxford Shakespeare : Authorship Companion / eds. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan. - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Shakespeare, 2018, vol. 14, no. 3, p. 291-296 DOI : 10.1080/17450918.2018.1496136 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:123514 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 Review of The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, gen. eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Critical Reference Edition, 2 vols., gen. eds. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Authorship Companion, eds. Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Lukas Erne English Department, University of Geneva, Switzerland The publication of The New Oxford Shakespeare is a major event in the editorial history of Shakespeare. There are three components to it, adding up to almost 8,000 pages: the one-volume Modern Critical Edition, which contains the plays and poems in modernized spelling; the two-volume Critical Reference Edition with the texts in original spelling; and the Authorship Companion. The New Oxford Shakespeare Online contains the content of the print volumes in digital format and receives no separate treatment in this review. The Complete Alternative Versions, which, at the time of writing, is still in preparation, will contain versions of Shakespeare’s works not included in the Modern Critical Edition. Although published one year after the Modern Critical Edition, the Authorship Companion (2017) is preliminary to it in that the decisions about the plays’ and poems’ inclusion in and exclusion from the edition depend on and are explained in it. Edited by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, the Authorship Companion is divided into two parts. Part 1, devoted to ‘Methods’, opens with Gary Taylor’s ‘Artiginality: Authorship after Postmodernism’, which provides a rationale for authorship attribution studies, in particular as it relates to Shakespeare and early modern drama, and Gabriel Egan’s excellent ‘History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution’. They are followed by a series of chapters devoted to methodological issues, such as trigram tests (60-66) and the LION collocation test (92-106). Part 2 contains a series of case studies of which some conclusions are worth quoting here. Concerning the anonymously published domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, Jack Elliott and Brett 1 Greatley-Hirsch write that ‘It is impossible to reconcile the results we have found with a belief that Shakespeare had no hand’ in it, and so Arden ‘takes its rightful place in the canon of his works’ (181). MacDonald P. Jackson’s tests on the same play ‘unequivocally classifies scenes 4-9 … as Shakespeare’s’ (193). In their analysis of the authorship of 3 Henry VI, John Burrows and Hugh Craig come to the conclusion that ‘there is much here to indicate that Marlowe is the author of the non- Shakespeare parts’ (i.e. 1.1-2, 2.3, 3.3, 4.2-9, and 5.2) ‘and little to indicate the contrary’ (217). Three scholars agree with the view that Shakespeare wrote or at least contributed to the additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, first published in 1602. Hugh Craig holds that the additions ‘fit well with the Shakespeare pattern’ in terms of his ‘regular style as represented in the function words’ (245). Gary Taylor arrives at the conclusion that ‘it seems reasonable, at this point, to identify the Additions published in 1602 as the collaborative work of [Thomas] Heywood and Shakespeare’ (260). And John V. Nance argues that Shakespeare ‘is more likely than any other author to have written the Painter’s Part in Addition IV’ (276). To these arguments about Shakespeare’s authorship of additions to a play by another playwright should be added Taylor and Doug Duhaime’s argument that the Fly Scene (3.2) in Titus Andronicus, absent from the quartos (1594, 1600, 1611) but present in the Folio (1623), is in fact an addition by another playwright to Shakespeare’s play: their investigation ‘proves’, they write, ‘that Shakespeare cannot have written the scene, and all the tests point to a single alternative Jacobean candidate’ (67): Thomas Middleton. Another play that receives sustained attention thanks to Middleton is All’s Well that Ends Well. Rory Loughnane argues that Shakespeare did not write the play collaboratively with Middleton, as Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith proposed a few years ago, but that Middleton added ‘new material to All’s Well that Ends Well, most likely as a revival for the King’s Men after Shakespeare’s death at some point between 1616 and the setting of the Folio’ (320). John V. Nance arrives at results that ‘suggest Middleton as the author of [the king’s speech in] All’s Well 2.3.117-30’ (336), and Gary Taylor adds that ‘beyond a reasonable doubt … Middleton added material to 1.1, 2.3, and 4.3 of Shakespeare’s original play’ (365). Finally, two scholars turn to Double Falsehood, the early eighteenth-century play by Lewis Theobald, whose relationship to the lost play Cardenio, which the stationer Humphrey Moseley 2 assigned to John Fletcher and Shakespeare in 1653, has been much explored in recent times. Marina Tarlinskaja’s analysis of the versification of Double Falsehood ‘suggests’, she writes, ‘that what Theobald had in his possession was not the original Jacobean manuscript but a later, post-Restoration rewrite, possibly by Davenant’, and so Double Falsehood, she concludes, ‘seems to contain three layers from different times: Shakespeare-Fletcher, Davenant, and Theobald’. ‘The original text’, she adds, ‘was probably the lost Cardenio’ (406). Giuliano Pascucci concludes his analysis by claiming that ‘the possibility that Theobald forged Double Falsehood is eliminated. Theobald had a manuscript of a play containing contributions by Shakespeare and Fletcher, as many studies have shown, and, we believe, contributions by Massinger too. The likeliest explanation, then, is that Theobald had a manuscript of the lost play Cardenio’ (416). What is striking about these case studies is the confidence with which the conclusions are presented, even when the sample is small (the Fly Scene is 84-lines long) or when the extant play (Double Falsehood) is argued to be an eighteenth-century rewrite of a late seventeenth-century rewrite of the play to which Shakespeare contributed (Cardenio). Even if we grant that significant advances have been made in authorship attribution studies (and this reviewer certainly does), such confidence may nonetheless seem surprising. At the end of his chapter on the authorship of two poems – ‘When God was pleas’d’ and ‘Shall I die’ – that were attributed to Shakespeare in manuscript, Gary Taylor writes: ‘Until we have better tools, readers must simply make up their own minds. Or perhaps, preferably, refuse to make up their minds’ (230). Yet elsewhere in the volume, there is little such commendable reluctance to jump to firm conclusions, including by Taylor himself. One consequence of the confidence with which new authorship attributions are made and embedded in editions is the short-lived nature of authorial canons in supposedly authoritative editions. In 2007, Taylor and his fellow editors innovated by including Macbeth and Measure for Measure in the Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton on the grounds that Middleton revised and added to these plays after Shakespeare’s death. That decision already seems outdated now if Middleton also revised and added to Titus Andronicus and All’s Well that Ends Well, which means that not just the former two but all four plays should have been included in the Collected Works of Middleton. If the field continues to evolve at a similar pace, then some of the conclusions now embedded in The New 3 Oxford Shakespeare will no doubt be superseded soon. Gary Taylor is aware of this and calls The New Oxford Shakespeare ‘an exploratory embodiment of research in progress’ (Modern Critical Edition, p. iv). If so, we may wonder whether this exploration in progress needed to be published in four hard- back volumes selling for £ 295, or whether a digital archive that could be updated every time research leads to new insights and convictions would have done the job. The last chapter in the Authorship Companion is at the same time the longest: Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane’s ‘Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’ extends to almost 200 pages. No fully argued Shakespeare chronology had been undertaken since Taylor’s in the Textual Companion (1987) to the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (1986), so it may be worthwhile mentioning some of its noteworthy features. The chronology now starts in 1588 (Oxford Shakespeare: 1590/91), with Shakespeare writing The Two Gentlemen in Verona in 1588, contributing to Arden of Faversham later in the same year, and composing Titus Andronicus (with George Peele) in 1589. He contributes to 2 and 3 Henry VI (written with Marlowe and an unidentified playwright) in 1590 and Edward III (also with an unidentified playwright) in 1592, and writes single-handedly The Taming of the Shrew (1591) and Richard III (1592).
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